Lifestyle

LivesOn Will Let You Tweet From Beyond the Grave

Those who like to plan ahead know that getting your affairs in order requires a lot of hard work and preparation. Who gets your property in the will? How much will it cost to organize a funeral service? Who's going to manage your Twitter account?

To address the concern over tracking your social networks after death, one London-based ad agency is looking to keep you tweeting even after you've passed with LivesOn, an artificial intelligence experiment.

LivesOn makes a new Twitter account for you while you're still alive and analyzes your original account for your interests, tastes and syntax. As time goes on, the LivesOn feed will begin posting updates, after learning your style. Users will be able to favorite tweets to give feedback, increasing the system's intelligence. When the time comes, you can nominate an "executor" to your LivesOn will, and they will decide whether to keep your account live.

The company, Lean Mean Fighting Machine, makes it clear they're not launching a product. Rather, LivesOn is an experiment with a good deal of work ahead of it. And the service won't be used as an app but as another feed set up for you.

"The thought just came that, over time, with Moore's Law, et cetera, tech becoming more pervasive — how much of ourselves will we give to zeros and ones? Will any of it really constitute us?" Bedwood tells Mashable in an email. "But it's hard to see this trend reversing. And if we are posting all this stuff, what will happen to it? It feels evolutionary in a way, inevitable that man will use technology to somehow live on."

The agency is working on the experiment with Queen Mary University in London and plans to start testing as soon as possible. Bedwood says the experiment isn't about bringing people back from the dead, but examining how much of ourselves we really give up to technology. Will the amount of data we contribute be able to constitute life after death?

Apps like Facebook's If I Die and DeadSocial already let you send post-death messages on social networks. LivesOn, however, eliminates the pre-written text and seeks to do all the work for you. The service aims to tackle the idea of spending more time away from computers and allowing connections without actually being connected.

The experiment will likely use Bayesian inference, genetic algorithm and Google Prediction, Bedwood explains. While users are still alive, the system can serve as an aggregator of what they like, similar to the way Netflix or Amazon operates with suggestions.

"The goal is to get it to almost become like a twin," Bedwood says. "So you can go and do other stuff whilst your LivesOn version scours the Internet for the things you would like to read and watch."

Would you use LivesOn? What do you think of carrying on a digital legacy after death? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Mashable
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